


To help our Bleaker parts

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Civil War, Angst, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Female Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Letters, Role Reversal, argument
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10891500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: There'd been an uncanny collective sense that it had happened before but everyone except Matron brushed it off. She only waited.





	To help our Bleaker parts

Mary was the one who handed her the letter. The older woman had found her in the hall, at the threshold of the smaller ward, and had beckoned to her. Emma had nearly expected Mary to take her arm as they walked, as her friend Clarissa had used to when they were allowed to call upon a neighbor without their mothers; the angle of the Head Nurse’s head recalled her old friend’s confiding face, a similarity in their tidy, dark chignons and slender shoulders. Mary’s gait was familiar now and they kept pace easily. Such was Mary’s strength of will that Emma did not suspect anything was terribly, terribly wrong until the Head Nurse closed the door behind them and turned to face her.

“This is for you, Emma. I can’t tell you how sorry I am to be the one to give it to you,” Mary said, reaching into the pocket of her pinafore and bringing out the square of paper, offering it with an expression on her face that spoke of sorrow and concern, that said she was bracing herself for Emma’s collapse. The envelope was closed but not sealed and Mary observed her looking at that without making any movement to open it.

“There wasn’t much time. He said he trusted I’d keep it safe for you,” Mary added. Emma lifted the flap, focusing on the feeling of the page under her fingertips, not allowing herself to ask a question, lest they all spill from her lips like the snakes and beetles of the fairy tale. She glanced at the writing, taking in the few uneven lines and the blots and then was reading it before she even noticed, hearing his hoarse voice in her mind.

> Dear Friend,
> 
> Forgive me for leaving only this for you, but it’s all that is allowed and I must go. My family has called me home and I am useless here, a burden and a danger to all those I care for most. I would have you know how much I admire and esteem you, how much I wish I had not fallen ill when you had the greatest need of me, how very dear to me you are. You and I are subject to God’s will just as any of his servants are and now it seems we must be parted. As much as I am able, I will pray for you, Emma, and hope God forgives me if it is your name on my lips when I go and not His.
> 
> With abiding affection,
> 
> Henry Hopkins

“What have you done? Where is he? Why—how could you do it, Mary?” Emma cried, not trying to conceal her distress and anger as she had been carefully trained to do since she was a small girl. “A lady never lets her countenance show anything but complete and lovely serenity, Emma,” her mother had repeated after every argument and injustice but the early instruction meant nothing to her in the face of the truth: Henry had gone from Mansion House and she might never see him again. 

He had fallen ill two weeks earlier, at first waving away her questions about his glassy eyes and catarrh but within a day or two, the fever set in. Samuel Diggs had helped Henry back up to his room “to rest until dinner, that’s all I need” and she had wanted to believe him so much she’d returned to the boys she was tending and told herself she’d look in before she went to help Belinda with the meal. She had been in the ward furthest from the stairs and the man she sat beside was snoring; she did not hear anything unusual until she stood to stretch her weary, cramped legs, to see if the air in the hall would refresh her and then there had been the sound of Mary screaming,

“Jed! Jed, oh, dear God, come!” 

And then the sound had been muffled but the thud of Dr. Foster’s boots as he took the stairs two at a time mimicked Emma’s pounding heart. Emma had been still, as if a butterfly pinned, for the space of a breath and the one that followed, then she had flown up the stairs towards the open door of Henry’s room and found something approaching Bedlam. Dr. Foster was shouting for ice as he was examining Henry, Mary and Sister Isabella on either side, their dresses dark with the water they’d splashed soaking cloths to try and cool Henry. The nun was murmuring a prayer at such a speed Emma could not make out the Latin words and Mary was crooning something at Henry, “just a little longer, stay with us, be better soon, soon,” and then Samuel Diggs pushed past with a large basic full of ice and he and Dr. Foster had starting breaking the block with picks and chisels to fill the copper tub that an orderly had dragged into the room. The sound of the metal against the ice was hellish. The two men had nearly carried Henry’s limp body between them and gotten him into the tub, then started dumping in the chunks of ice while Mary poured water from a bucket; Henry’s eyes had opened midway through and he’d seen her though he was half-dazed with the fever. He’d made a gesture with his hand where it was draped over the lip of the tub. She had gone to him as if they were alone and had held his hand, wordless while the others talked and prayed and argued around her, Major McBurney creeping in and then muttering about the risk of contagion until Dr. Foster bellowed at him to “Leave off, he’s my patient, not yours, you utter coward!”

“Hurts,” Henry had mumbled, like a little boy except for the bluish shadow of his unshaven beard, the entirely male breadth of his shoulders, apparent in the wet shirt, the matted dark hair on his chest like a paisley pattern beneath the soaked linen. Emma had wanted to kneel beside him and push back the unruly hair from his forehead, but she couldn’t do anything except hold his hand in hers and look at him beseechingly before she remembered herself a little, how she was supposed to be a nurse and what that meant.

“You’ll feel better when you’re cooler. It’s the fever,” she’d said and he’d blinked with some confusion, tightening his grasp on her. She realized her fear had made her sound as she had when she first arrived, her drawling accent pronounced and foreign, not soothing to a Yankee man in the most grievous straits. She could not be sure he knew who she was.

“Henry, it’s me, it’s Emma,” she began softly but Jed Foster interrupted roughly, commanding, fearful.

“Christ, he’s going to seize! Samuel, more ice, Henry, hang on, man. Mary—fetch the brandy, hurry love!”

The room was all tumult but Emma had still noticed the startled, soothed look on Mary’s face at the endearment and how unthinkingly it fell from Dr. Foster’s lips. The Head Nurse had been nearly out of the room when Henry went limp in the tub, his eyes closed, a hitching sigh almost pulled from him.

“Henry!” Emma had cried. No other word was possible.

“He’s only fainted, miss. Pulse’s thready but he’s alive,” Samuel had said. She’d never known him to make a mistake, but she could not help glancing at Dr. Foster, who had nodded.

“Wasn’t the crisis, but the risk of seizure’s likely passed. The brandy can wait. We’ll move him to the bed in a few minutes and Nurse Mary and Sister Isabella will care for him,” Dr. Foster had declared. Emma had looked at Mary for confirmation of her own exile from Henry’s care and had been reassured when Mary mouthed “Not now” with the smallest smile.

“I would nurse him, and him alone!” she’d cried later that day, outside Henry’s door as Mary had explained that Emma was not allowed in. _Your duty, your obligation to the others_ , Mary had said, _your own health and the risk to your good character_ , and Emma had only wanted to stamp her foot and push past. She’d not been able to stop herself and had taken a step toward the door when Mary took her wrist lightly but implacably in her own.

“Emma, I’ll see. I understand…and I’ll see. But you must listen to me. You must trust me,” Mary had said and Emma had paused and nodded. Mary had looked away while Emma dashed the tears from her eyes. And then Emma had returned to her Rebel soldiers, acutely aware that Henry was not in the next room or ministering beside her, but lying in a bed a floor above, suffering. She had been grateful when Mary came for her and let her sit with Henry for a few minutes while Mary and Sister Isabella attended to other matters and she had been hopeful when he opened his eyes and managed a smile for her. She had had every confidence that between Mary’s indomitable will and Jed Foster’s indubitable expertise, Henry’s own strong constitution, that he would lie abed a few days and then return, perhaps slowly, to his regular work, his lingering symptoms to be clucked over and coddled a bit, but requiring nothing more. She had not wanted to see how Henry failed to rally, how Mary pressed her lips together, how Dr. Foster walked through the wards with his linen mussed and his shoulders slumped; she had not let herself say any words when she prayed beside her bed at night but sent her soul to the heavens begging for a merciful cure.

She had not imagined they could do this—send him away. Away from the best chance he had of recovery with a European-trained physician, from his work and his friends, from the War that meant everything to him except for what she hoped she meant to him. From her. Emma had not known she was capable of the rage that she felt, reading the letter he had labored over and then looking up to see Mary’s face filled with compassion and pity and a sort of reflected misery that must be the memory of her husband’s death, for it could not be anything else.

“How _could_ you?” Emma repeated, as if saying the words again would make Henry return to the bed he belonged in, where she had sat beside him for a few minutes a day, talking or reading if he was awake, simply watching him if he had managed to sleep. 

“It was not my doing, Emma,” Mary began, her tone steady.

“But you didn’t stop it! You must have helped, nothing is done here without your help, without your fine hand at the helm,” Emma spat out. Mary’s color didn’t change but she could not keep the timbre of her voice the same and Emma took an obscure pleasure in that.

“Major McBurney insisted. He is the Chief Medical Officer here. Dr. Foster argued with him, but he was…unsuccessful and then the Major sent him on an errand. A fool’s errand, but he could not refuse a direct order. I am the Head Nurse but for all that, my hands were, are tied,” Mary replied. “And then the letter came, from his family. Asking when they might come fetch him home.”

“Why didn’t you call for me? Why didn’t you ask me, I would have found a way, I would have spoken with my father, Henry could still be here in Alexandria, with us, with--” Emma asked, breaking off before she could say the word they both knew she intended, with me. She could have convinced her father, she was certain of it; Belinda would have supported her and her mother would have agreed with her appeals to the duties of a true Southern woman, a Christian’s obligation to a suffering servant of the Lord.

“He didn’t want you,” Mary said bluntly, sadly. Emma saw Henry’s face in her mind’s eye, how he would have struggled to speak, the catarrh racking him, how he would have turned his face away to try and spare Mary any distress. She wouldn’t believe it.

“He?” Emma stumbled on it.

“Henry, Reverend Hopkins, he said he didn’t want you troubled any more. He said he wanted to write the letter and he wanted me to give it to you. I couldn’t say no to him, Emma.”

“You’re lying,” Emma said, choking a little as she said it. To accuse Mary of dishonesty, what could not be further from her nature, was bitter but she could not help herself.

“She’s not and you know better than that, Miss Green,” Dr. Foster said from the doorway. She had not noticed him before he spoke but he must have stood there for a few minutes, listening to them and not interrupting. Mary turned to him and Emma saw how her face altered, just as it had when Dr. Foster had commanded her during Henry’s first crisis. Dr. Foster walked toward them, standing near enough to Mary to touch her but not even grazing her hand with his. The tenderness between them was apparent and invisible at once and it broke Emma’s heart to know she would not have it herself. Not anymore.

“He didn’t want to go, he would not have left of his own free will,” Emma declared, except that it was a question too and she searched Jed Foster’s eyes for a confirmation.

“But he did,” he said gently. “That letter, his family wanted him home, we, I sent a telegram, and how could we deny him? A man wants to die with his family around him,” he went on. His voice changed as he spoke and she knew his despair, his hopeless frustration. Mary did as well and reached out for his hand when he finished, after he said _die_. It should not be possible for Henry but she thought of the shadows under his eyes and how drawn he had become, the way illness had removed everything that obscured the beauty of his bones, the vitality of his soul.

“Are you certain? That he’ll die? That there’s no chance?” she said. Jed looked at her, uncharacteristically quiet and it was Mary who answered.

“There is always a chance. Only God is certain. But he was not getting any better here. Major McBurney would not allow us to…We hoped, you see, if he went home, perhaps there…” she trailed off, saying _we_ in a way that Emma understood she and Dr. Foster had discussed the situation at length, argued and wept over it. That is had not only been a woman’s tears shed, not only a man’s voice raised in anger.

“I cannot go to him,” Emma said, like the judge pronouncing the sentence, except that she was also the man in the docket. What had been her crime?

“But you may write to him,” Mary said softly.

“And pray for him,” Dr. Foster added, surprising her with his earnest piety, the solemnity of his tone. “Sometimes, it’s all we have left. Sometimes, it’s enough.”

Their voices were muffled by their embrace as Emma left the room, but she heard Dr. Foster reciting “Tho’ much is taken, much abides…” with his hand upon Mary’s netted hair and she knew she must find the words to send Henry, for him to read or have read to him upon his arrival home, the truest words, those meant _to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield_.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing more canon divergent AU towards the end of the series; it occurred to me it would be interesting to shuffle the characters and deal with someone else becoming seriously ill and being sent away. I had originally planned to make this longer, with more scenes, but with the ending of the show, I decided it would be more powerful to keep it shorter and tighter. I did want to see how much of the original script I could manage to work in and so I also incorporated the Tennyson again. The title is Emily Dickinson, though.


End file.
